One of the problems with Structured Query Language as opposed to languages like C++, Java, Python, or PHP is that it is hard to tell if a query is good or bad just by looking at it. A programmer with a few months of coding experience can be shown a snippet of code from a project and have a pretty good chance of telling if that code is good or not. Some call this a 'code smell'.
A programmer can tell if the code is legible,
understandable, and many times if it performs well often times at
just a glance. Want to do an experiment on this? Go
out to Github and check out a handful of random
projects. Good code often just looks good.
But SQL is different. It is mostly a declarative language, telling the computer what it wants rather than how to make what it wants. You can random pull SQL queries off Gitthub or Stackoverflow or Reddit …
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